Trying to work out an archival scheme

Mark snark at pobox.com
Fri Jan 2 19:09:21 EST 2009


I've been poking through the FAQ and mailing list archives to solve this
problem... and if I missed it, please point me back that way.

I have been running gnucash for many years... and before that ran
various other accounting programs.  The result of this is that my
gnucash data goes back to 1994 and has about 14k transactions.  This is
starting to stress my aging computers.  ("Upgrade hardware" is probably
the logical answer.)

I've been looking at threads about shrinking file size:
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2008-November/027446.html
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2008-December/027538.html

The perl solution sounds promising... though I am worried about the
disclaimer in it that says it doesn't handle stocks.

What I am looking for (or to do myself) is the "correct" methodology to
go about doing basically the same thing, only handling stocks.  Now I
have no accounting background at all, but in my head I want to offload
all the old transactions EXCEPT the ones dealing in non-currency items.
 In other words, if I wrote a check for 10 shares of FOO, I still want
the 10 shares of FOO on my books (assuming I haven't sold them) even if
they are from 1994.

What I am looking to do is archive everything older than say 5 years old
except for non-cash assets.  I am trying to sort out the right way to do
this (either by hacking close-books.pl or doing it manually.)  I have a
little bit of experience hacking the XML file from a previous ugly hack,


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